St Peter's was founded as a Hostel for students in 1928, but with greater ambitions in view.
The College was founded by Bishop Francis James Chavasse (1846-1928), and his son Christopher Maude Chavasse (1884-1962), later Bishop of Rochester, who became the first Master and guided St Peter's through its first precarious ten years of rapid expansion. The original aim was to provide a low-cost Oxford education for promising but impoverished students.
Bishop Francis James died in 1928. St Peter's thus became a memorial to this much-loved evangelical Bishop, who was the inspiration and prime-mover behind the building of Liverpool Cathedral, and its second Bishop. Sufficient supporters rallied to a memorial appeal launched by his son to raise £150,000 to build student accommodation and modify existing buildings.
A frenetic building programme enabled the University Vice Chancellor to licence St Peter's as a Permanent Private Hall. Thus in 1929 St Peter's Hall was born with 40 students.
In the same year the Hall was granted its Coat of Arms incorporating the Arms of Bishop Chavasse and a device representing the church of St Peter-le-Bailey (now the College chapel).
The rapid expansion was not without its dangers. By 1933 the worldwide financial crisis of that year struck down the Hall's principal supporter, an educational Trust, which had guaranteed the £70,000 mortgage secured on the Hall's own buildings. Fortunately help was at hand: The motor-car manufacturer and philanthropist, William Morris, (Lord Nuffield), came to the rescue saving the Hall from certain closure. Lord Nuffield's portrait as Benefactor surveys the College dining hall.
During the Second World War students from Westfield College, London, occupied the Hall's buildings. St Peter's men were boarded out in other colleges.
In 1947, now with 120 students, the Hall was granted the status of "New Foundation", a significant step in the process of becoming a college. In 1961, with 250 students, the grant of a Royal Charter to "The Master, Fellows and Scholars of the College of St Peter-le-Bailey" completed the process to full collegiate status.
Since then, with the support of alumni and generous benefactors, the story has been one of growth and expansion. Women were admitted for the first time in 1979. Student numbers, including post-graduates, have risen to 450 or more.
St Peter's is now an established and thriving college of the University. It occupies a site that for 600 years has been a home to students, a continuation of the medieval Halls that preceded it. The acquisition of this wonderful and most convenient central site in the City, was, in the words of the first Master "a chance of ages". What St Peter's lacks in great quadrangles and extensive gardens it gains in intimacy and friendliness, a quality remarked upon be generation after generation of the students for whom it has been home.